


epiclesis

by zipegs



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Character Deaths, Gen, Gore, Horror, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, an admittedly obscene amount of references to catholicism, with appearances by many of your fave mutineers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-03 02:47:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21172157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zipegs/pseuds/zipegs
Summary: The first time Lieutenant Hodgson eats of man, it slides down his throat and sits like in his stomach like a stone.Written for Halloween Terrorfest day 7: a disquieting metamorphosis





	epiclesis

The first time Lieutenant Hodgson eats of man, it slides down his throat and sits like in his stomach like a stone.

The meat is slimy and tough between his molars, like the gristle they used to toss beneath the table for Neptune. He chews until his jaw aches with it, teeth loose and wobbling in their sockets.

The flavor falls somewhere short of abhorrent. It’s bland if a bit gamey, with a thick, sweet aftertaste that coats the back of his throat like syrup.

It sickens him, how little he dislikes it.

Hodgson does not want to be like these men. These traitors who look at a man on the verge of death and see only a feast. He does not seek to commune with mutineers, to bathe his own hands in the blood of his brothers, and thus lingers about their fringes. Perches himself on a barrel apart from the other men as if, through distance, he might station himself above them.

He pokes at the glistening lumps of meat with shaking hands, fork rattling against his plate like a castanet.

At the table, Hickey and his men sit in silence. They pick up chunks of Billy Gibson with their fingers and drop them like candies onto their tongues. Lick his pink juices off their thumbs, their forefingers.

_This is my body_, Hodgson thinks, milky gaze fastened on the silhouettes hunched against the pale, colourless horizon. Light winks through the perfect, clean slashes in Hickey’s navy wool coat. Like fingers of sunlight parting the clouds.

His throat burns. Tears prick at his eyes.

There is beauty in all things.

Eternity through atrocity.

The second time Lieutenant Hodgson eats of man, he closes his eyes and thinks of salvation.

\---

He feels it in his bones first.

They ache—a constant, deep-seated throbbing. Like someone has grabbed hold of each end and _pulled_. It’s a new kind of agony, wholly unlike the thick, dull pain he has come to acknowledge as scurvy. This is harder, somehow—more primal. It is as intense as any pain he has known here in this distant circle of hell, and yet there is divinity in it, he thinks. Holiness.

He closes his eyes and relishes the pulse of it through him, like a second heartbeat hiding just beneath his own.

The other men do not take to it as kindly. They grunt in their harnesses—low, guttural sounds that layer themselves atop the scrape of wood over rock. Des Voeux whines high in his throat like an animal. Armitage burps out an occasional moan. Tozer is silent, but he wears his suffering plain on his face. Hodgson can hear it all clearly—the wind has died, and in the silence that follows, thick sounds of agony ring like a clavier.

Hodgson lets his own pain resound in him, swallowing around the shape of it in his throat. He imagines it as a summer sun, glowing warm and radiant from within his ribcage.

How long they go on like this, he cannot say. Time itself seems to freeze—there is nothing but the pain. The noise of it. The phantom taste of meat on their tongues, pieces of it clinging like taffy to the spaces between their teeth.

This is repentance, he thinks. Atonement.

Pain is the price of redemption. 

There is an _Agnus Dei _to be found in their clenched jaws and wet panting; Hodgson pictures it spiraling outward to whatever deity will listen, a new kind of music for a new kind of god. In the distance, the blue of the sky glints like stained-glass windows darkened by clouds.

His fingers are throbbing. Looking down at them, they seem longer somehow, punching out like new shoots from the bulbs of his grey fingerless gloves. Like the promise of spring after a long winter’s thaw.

He curls them around the leather of his harness and _hauls_.

\---

The days stretch into each other.

Haul. Rest. Haul again.

Each evening, when Hickey decides they have gone far enough—one mile? ten? twenty? there is no way to tell—the men unchain themselves and draw their tents from the sledges, dragging the ungainly canvas-wrapped bags over the boat’s side like shrouded bodies. They fall freely once liberated from their resting place and smack against the shale with a solid thump.

He can feel Hickey watching. Assessing. The weight of his gaze sliding over them like seal fat.

There is glory in being seen.

No trial without a witness.

Around camp, the men move like wind-up toys on the last legs of life. They erect their shelters slowly, stopping to rub at their jaws and forearms as though they might scrub the pain from their skin.

That is the crux of it; they do not see what Hodgson does. These men think they deserve to be clean.

He closes his eyes. Listens to the creak and groan of the tent-poles, like cries for liberation. The sound is echoed someplace deep in his bones. He lets his agony grow, taking root in his marrow like fungus and spreading its spores outward.

At the edge of the camp, Goodsir’s tent sits silent and empty.

A promise.

A reminder. 

The men have witnessed what comes of weakness. The kind of end served to those who cannot stomach the gift they have been given.

He thinks of Billy Gibson and his empty harness. The pink-stained bags tucked in the sledge like heirlooms. The mouth-watering smell of copper and the way it carries on the scentless air, trailing them like a cloud of incense.

In the morning, he sits on the edge of camp and feels the lengthening gaps in his spine. Sticks his fingers between them and worries the corded muscle there. Near the center, Hickey pries one of the bags open and reaches in so far its ruffled jaws swallow his arm all the way to the shoulder. He pulls out a fistful of flesh, muscle quivering in stringy strips between his fingers.

Hodgson can feel the phantom slide of it down his throat. The fullness which would blossom in his belly.

Need is a wild beast inside him.

“Come,” Hickey says. The men hobble out of their tents, bodies frosted with sleep. As they gather around him, he keeps his hand outstretched, proffering pieces of Billy Gibson’s body like some kind of saint. “Come eat with me.”

Juice drips down his forearm and gathers in fat drops at the sharp point of his elbow. It gathers the light of the sun and falls in a steady _pat_ onto the shale.

Hodgson rises and falls into line with the others. He looks at the meat in Hickey’s fist and thinks of pomegranate seeds.

\---

By the time Billy Gibson is more inside of them than inside of the bags, there is no denying it.

Something is happening.

The men are afraid—Hodgson can sense it. The stench of their fear is thick in the air, astringent and saline. It fills his nostrils and carves out a home there.

As a lieutenant, it was once his job to manage men. To listen. To encourage.

It is not like that anymore.

Whatever comforts he has left, he keeps for himself—he will not waste them on men like these. He might sit among them, might haul alongside them, but he is not one of them.

He huddles with several around the pale fire, hands folded awkwardly in his lap. His nails are so caked with grime they seem almost charred, tips grown jagged and pointed. Like most, he is hunched forward like a fern, shoulders drawn inward and spine curving down like a fish hook.

It is their natural state, now. Like their bodies are dragged downward by the weight of their sins.

_Confiteor Deo et beatae Mariae semper virgini_.

He has been given his penance.

They all have.

In the distance, up on the hill, Hickey stands immovable and erect—a prophet receiving revelation. Hodgson’s eyes are drawn to him; he cannot look away. In the dimming light, Hickey’s edges seem to blur into the landscape, the border between flesh and linen and sky smudged into each other. Like he is become part of this place.

Like he belongs here.

“It’s not natural,” Pilkington is saying to the others, arms wrapped tightly about his knees. “I can tell you that much. Feels like my spine’s punchin’ its way outta my back. Like a great big fist, pushin’ up under my skin.”

From the corner of his eye, Hodgson observes the hard clench of Pilkington’s jaw. The way Tozer’s gaze stabs at the ground. There’s a patch of skin just below his right eye that has turned grey and scaly, like day-old beef. Hodgson caught sight of it this morning. He remembers the desire that shuddered through him, the need to reach out and peel it off.

To take it inside of himself.

Across the fire, Des Voeux is shaking. His chin is tucked down, his throat extending too long for his body.

“My legs,” Pilkington continues, filling the taut silence with words that hang like rocks on a tenuous membrane. Any moment now, Hodgson thinks, it will rupture. “They don’t fit in my trousers anymore. I mean, we’re supposed to be starving, right?”

He looks up at them, eyes large and bloodshot under what remains of his lashes.

No one speaks.

When he resumes, his voice sounds rubbed raw.

Hodgson thinks of ground meat. Pictures the lining of Pilkington's throat shredding itself as he speaks.

He wants to shove a hand down into the boy’s mouth and scrape the sweet pulp out with his fingernails.

“I’m so _hungry,_ all the time. But my calves are— They’re— It doesn’t make any sense.” Pilkington’s voice cracks off. The bumps of his knuckles are white, fists clasped in front of his shins. He blows out a watery breath. “_He_ knows. I’m sure of it.”

His face is strangely bestial in the fire’s hellish light, eyes sunken and cheekbones high and pointed.

Hodgson can trace the paths of muscle just under the skin, wrapping down over his jaw.

The whites—reds—of his eyes are pronounced and wet. Hodgson imagines scooping one out with his pinky and popping it between his molars like a cherry.

“He knows exactly what’s happening to us.” Pilkington is looking out at the hill. At Hickey. Though his voice trembles, he does not look away. Transfixed, as Hodgson was, by the pale glow of him.

\---

Billy Gibson does not last them much longer.

In his place, the men fall like vultures upon what remains of their tinned provisions, but those too are dwindling. Hodgson shovels the watery sludge into his mouth along with the others, feels it sticking like mud in the back of his throat.

It does not fill him. The more he eats, the hungrier he becomes.

The men appear to feel it the same—their fervor increases with each spoonful, like bacchants at their first sip of wine. They scrape desperately at the bottoms of the tins, as though clawing at the lid of a coffin, and snatch seconds from the crates, thirds. 

Hickey does not stop them; he looks on with beady eyes, a smirk curling on his lips.

This is repentance, Hodgson reminds himself.

His jaw aches.

Soon they will be free. 

When the fervor has died down, sluggish desperation takes its place. He looks out across the shale and sees it littered with tins like hollow carapaces, cracked open and dented. A wasteland of steel and lead, lids popped up and out like gravestones.

The men cradle them against their faces. Let the rims slice deep into their tongues as they lick at the thick juice that clings to the bottom and sides.

Their moans rise off them like steam, a discordant harmony Hodgson feels echoed in his marrow.

Absolution, he thinks desperately. Purification.

In their haste to pry the tins open, some of the men drive knives deep into their fingers—John Diggle slices the webbing between his thumb and forefinger right up to his wrist. When he moves his hand, the hole gapes like a slack-jawed mouth, drooling blood onto the cold rock. Hodgson watches, entranced, as he wraps his lips around the gash and _sucks._

His mouth waters.

He does not think he’s seen anything so beautiful as that steaming crimson. It runs in rivulets over Diggle’s waxen chin, the leathery skin of his arm.

_Poured out, _he thinks,_ for the forgiveness of sins._

He wants to taste it for himself.

\---

When they wake one day, ravenous and desperate, and find Pilkington lying facedown on the shale, they are too relieved to mourn.

\---

It is not long after that death becomes a constant presence among the men.

They cease hauling; none of them are strong enough anymore, except perhaps Hickey. The weakest lie in their tents and hunger. They stare glassy-eyed at the canvas above them, jaws snapping slow and empty, as though they mean to chew the air itself.

Their comrades gather at their bedside, huddled close—not to help, but to wait. To be the first to taste.

Some of the deaths are not easy; men pass moaning, screaming, convulsing. Bones snapped, muscles corded. Like something in them could not find its way out. Hodgson passes his fingers over their faces, their necks, their arms.

He wants to grieve, but finds gratefulness in its stead.

_Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts._

When there are more men dead than living, Hodgson lets his questions rise like a tide within him. He finds Hickey sitting cross-legged on the shale.

Hunger gnaws at his stomach. There is a blinding pressure in his jawbone.

“Lieutenant.”

He opens his mouth to speak, and something tears through his gum.

He gasps—the copper tang of blood floods his tastebuds. In the distance, he can hear Tozer screaming.

“Are you alright, Lieutenant?” Hickey asks. He looks up with mild intrigue, and does not move.

Hodgson’s mouth is aflame. The pressure in his jaw builds and builds until it comes to a head; a sharp, jagged pain, like serrated knife-points sawing upwards from beneath his gums, scraping his teeth out from their sockets. He cries out, and they clatter like pearls onto the shale.

His knees buckle.

There are more of them swirling in his mouth, loose and hard, like pieces of bone loosened from poorly-butchered meat. Hysteria boils within him. He retches, and spits them onto the ground. When he closes his lips, they form around _new_ teeth—long, pointed things. Animal. Savage.

“What is this?” he asks. The words are fat and ill-formed—his mouth is foreign to him. “What’s happening to us?”

Hickey reaches down and picks up a molar, its root shallow and wet with blood. The pad of his finger brushes over it slowly.

Reverently.

A half-smile curls on his lips. When he speaks, he does so without lifting his gaze.

“Divinity.”

\---

One morning, Hodgson wakes to find a patch of fur on his cheek.

He tries to rub the sleep out of his eyes and fails—exhaustion is a constant film over his vision, a third eyelid.

It’s then that he feels it. A brush of _something_ against the back of his thumb. An echo of feeling on the apple of his cheek.

At first, he does not know what it is, only that it does not belong. His stomach lurches into his throat. He scrapes the back of his hand across his cheek in a panic, as if to brush the thing off.

Pain throbs where he touches.

There is no other change. 

Trembling, he raises his hand again. The thatch of hair is easy to find, about an inch in size—sprouting from the high line of his cheekbone. It’s sparse but coarse, and feels akin to mangy fur beneath his fingertips.

Anxiety buzzes under his skin.

He knows without looking that it is not stubble. The feel of it is wrong, and he has never known stubble to bring with it such pain.

Hodgson thinks of the throbbing in his bones, the tattered mess of Pilkington’s lips. The odor of decay that clings to all of them. Like their flesh is rotting on their skeletons.

Doubt coils in his stomach.

The need to be rid of the thing is expanding inside him; there is not room enough for all his desperation. It swells and swells, pressing his organs against the small of his back, shoving his stomach up into his throat. His heart hammers in his chest.

_This isn’t right, _he thinks, twisting the strands between his fingers. The movement tugs at his skin, and sharp pain shoots out as if in answer. He gasps—a quick, hitched inhale—and pulls his hand away.

When he looks down at his fingers, they’re dotted with blood.

Trembling, he sits up and pushes his woolen bedcoverings back. More fur pokes out from beneath the hem of his trousers, off-white and short. The fuzz of a lad’s first beard. Beneath it, the entire span of his skin feels tender, like a bruised peach. He can feel every place a strand of the stuff pierces his flesh. Like hundreds of needles stuck into his skin.

The desire to look is almost as fierce as the desire to close his eyes. To hope he might wake again and find it all a dream.

He reaches down. Curls his fingers under the hem of his pant leg and slowly peels it up. 

There’s a small patch of the stuff right where his leg meets his foot. It’s haphazard, as though a child has taken a collection of thin white thorns and impaled them there with little care for pattern or consistency.

At the base of each strand, tiny pearls of blood gleam like rubies.

He lets the hem fall. Swings his legs over the side of the bed.

His heart is rattling in his ribcage. The need to _do_ something holds every muscle taut. He wants to take a razor and shear this affliction from him, skin and all, and yet fear keeps him locked in place.

Outside, the wind has kicked up. It sucks at the canvas of his tent.

He can hear the men moving around outside, the slow shuffle of their feet.

Hodgson raises a hand to his face.

Squeezes one strand of fur between his thumb and forefinger.

And pulls.

Pain explodes behind his eyes; he cries out, pulling harder. _Harder_. Wildly, he thinks that it must be out by now—that the agony has to relent. How much of it is stuck inside him? But it throbs even stronger, spreading outward until his entire cheek pulses with it.

Repentance, he reminds himself, hand trembling as his fingers sweep over the patch.

He fears he may pass out; his vision slips in and out of focus, unconsciousness washing over him in strong waves. 

Atonement.

It’s still there, poking out of his skin like a weed. Only it’s longer now, as though there is a spool of the stuff buried in his cheek.

Nausea swirls through him. He covers his eyes with his hands.

_He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him._

By nightfall, he is covered in it.

\---

“Lieutenant Hodgson.”

The flaps of his tent part, like skin peeled back from an incision. Watery light filters in through the gap. He can make out a shape blotting out some of it, a dark, blurry form that grows larger and larger until it is all he can see. Behind his head, the gray light cuts a shape like a halo.

“You don’t look well, Lieutenant.”

There are hands on his face. He tries to bat them away, but his limbs are slow to respond.

Fear is coiled in his breast, but his heart taps a slow, measured beat. It is, he thinks, quite unable to manage anything further.

“What—” His lips feel thick around his teeth. The taste of blood is hot on his tongue.

His mouth is pasty, as though his spit has turned to tar. It is difficult to swallow.

“Shhh.”

The hands move to his head. They stroke it gently, lovingly—a mother soothing an unwell child. He can feel his hair ripping in wet chunks away from his skull.

“We’re close now,” the man whispers. Hodgson can feel the heat of his breath. It dampens his ear canal, penetrating deep and making him shiver. “Can you feel it?”

The richness of flesh perfumes the air.

Blood pounds loud and eager through the man’s veins. Like a summons.

Hodgson wets his lips. He feels lightheaded; there is nothing in him but hunger.

_Dis-moi ce que tu manges je te dirai ce que tu es_.

He turns his head and _bites_.

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, thanks so much to [vegetas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vegetas/pseuds/vegetas) for her encouragement, and my gratitude to [bomburjo](https://bomburjo.tumblr.com) for betaing!


End file.
